Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nick Kotz, dies

Nick Kotz, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for exposing unsafe and unsanitary conditions in the nation’s meatpacking plants and who later became a Washington Post reporter and the author of books investigating hunger, civil rights and military contracting, died April 26 at his home near Broad Run, Va. He was 87.

According to a statement from the Virginia State Police, Kotz stopped his car in his driveway to retrieve an item from the back seat. The car rolled backward, striking him. He died at the scene.

Kotz, a well-known figure in Washington’s journalism circles for more than 50 years, was in his 30s when he won a Pulitzer while working in the Washington bureau of the Des Moines Register.

In 1967, he wrote more than 50 articles about poorly regulated meatpacking plants. He showed that, contrary to common belief, plants that did not engage in interstate commerce were not subject to federal inspection.

Conditions in many of those plants, Kotz found, were as dangerous and unsanitary as they had been at the turn of the 20th century, when muckraking reporter and novelist Upton Sinclair wrote about the deplorable state of the country’s slaughterhouses in his 1906 novel “The Jungle.”

As a result of Kotz’s investigations, Congress passed the Wholesome Meat Act of 1967, requiring all meatpackers and manufacturing companies to adhere to the same federal standards.

Kotz was invited to the White House to witness President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the bill into law. Also attending the ceremony was the 89-year-old Sinclair, more than 60 years after he had published “The Jungle.”

“By almost any measure of journalistic excellence,” consumer advocate Ralph Nader said in 1968, “Mr. Kotz came through with a classic performance of objectivity, timeliness, stamina and thorough coverage.”

Survivors include his wife of 59 years, the former Mary Lynn Booth, a journalist and author, of Broad Run; a son, Jack Kotz of Santa Fe, N.M.; and a grandson.